Photo at left shows work to install a permeable reactive barrier (PRB) to help clean up contamination from arsenic, molybdenum, nitrate, vanadium and uranium wastes at an EPA Superfund Site managed by the U.S. Department of Energy near Monticello, Utah. The cleanup was done under the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation and Liability Act (CERCLA), the law better known as Superfund. (DOE photo)
GOAT, the blog of High Country News, carried a short story that brought me nasty flashbacks.
Families in Monticello, Utah, wonder whether there is a connection between local clusters of leukemia the old, abandoned uranium works at the edge of town.
“Each depth had its own color. If the sun was just right, it was really pretty.” That’s how Steve Pehrson described the ponds he and his friends swam in as kids, as told to the Grand Junction Daily Sentinel. He and other Monticello, Utah, kids commonly cooled off in the tailings ponds at the uranium mill that sat on the edge of town. The kids also dug into the tailings piles, and the tailings were used in gardens and even sandboxes. Now, people in Monticello are looking into the link between these habits and cases of leukemia and other diseases that have cropped up amongst the citizenry.
If you follow that link to the Grand Junction (Colorado) Daily Sentinel, you find more stories, and more horrifying stories.
Nor are these stories of toxic and radioactive wastes limited to the Intermountain West. Last summer I traveled with a Boy Scout Troop to a camp in Tennessee not far from Oak Ridge. The hottest selling t-shirt showed a cartoon three-eyed fish. When I asked about it, I got the story of a warehouse in the Tennessee nuclear city establishment where, it was rumored, about a third of the world’s available mercury was stored for use in uranium processing. The warehouse had a dirt floor, and ultimately thousands of pounds of mercury could not be accounted for.
“The fish are probably fine,” the story teller said, “so long as nobody disturbs the several feet of mercury-laden sludge at the bottom of the lake.”
I may be more sensitive to these stories, having spent so much time working to get compensation for innocent victims of radiation from government production and tests. But yesterday the Dallas Morning News carried an open letter from leading Texas businessmen to the governor and our local utility, TXU, urging them to abandon plans for a dozen coal-fired power plants in favor of other alternatives, including nuclear power plants.
Nuclear power plants will probably be much better for global warming than any fossil-fuel plant. But when we get back in the business of making nuclear power, I pray to God that we’ll have the sense and decency to make the entire chain of nuclear power safe and secure, using the knowledge we have to protect workers and innocent bystanders from the hazards we well know.
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Millard Fillmore's Bathtub 